Tuning underlying Windows OS and/or Applications for BYOL WorkSpaces

Question

Customer has taken their on-premise standardised operating environment (SOE) for Windows 7 based desktops and essentially built the same SOE on Windows 7 BYOL WorkSpaces by installing the same software and applications using the same configuration.

My question is around how other customers tune their WorkSpaces desktops to maximize performance. My customer is running Standard WS instances and finding that the performance is sometimes "a bit lacking with high CPU loads while not performing overly taxing tasks". I am working with their service provider to dive deeper on the exact issues.

In my previous experience with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) based solutions like with Citrix Published Applications/Desktops and VMware Horizon View, there was guidance from them on how to reduce the performance (both CPU and memory) demands of the hosted desktops by reducing "unnecessary" items such as full screen window redraws when moving windows (i.e. configure it to draw the window outline instead), etc.

Since WorkSpaces is providing dedicated virtual machine resources (CPU and memory is not oversubscribed) vs. all shared resources in the previous examples (Citrix, VMware Horizon View), I can understand why these tuning recommendations may not be applicable to WorkSpaces.

Do customers follow this type of guidance for WorkSpaces, or is it not necessary?

Accepted Answer

Workspace instances are indeed dedicated to users and not sessions running within a shared VM. That said, given that the instance is running on a hypervisor, there is still benefit in stopping unnecessary services to maximise the resources that the instance has to give to applications most compute resources. So, still a good practice.

There are a number of different workspace bundles, ideally customers have an understanding of what their current workloads are prior to moving them to WorkSpaces, then they know they've selected the correct bundle type. It is also worth regularly reviewing the the demands of applications to ensure that the bundle selected is still providing the performance required.

In order to understand detailed application performance requirements, check out Liquidware Stratusphere on the Amazon market place (https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B01N9ESVJX?qid=1510773307509&sr=0-1&ref_=srh_res_product_title)

Tuning underlying Windows OS and/or Applications for BYOL WorkSpaces

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